How
did it happen that our dominant political culture puts America’s
majority population - white people - in a negative light?

First,
start with race-based slavery. I would argue that this was driven
by a desire for economic gain rather than by white people’s sadistic
desire to subjugate blacks. Black Africans were sold into slavery by other
African blacks. But the slave trade now has a purely white face. Slavery
as a racial institution feeds a political agenda that remains even after
slavery in America has legally been abolished for nearly a century and
a half.

If
slavery were seen as an example of economic exploitation, then its
opponents would have to confront the continuing cases of economic
exploitation. However,
the exploiters are politically too strong; they may even fund “progressive” groups.
It’s easier today to kick the corpse of race-based slavery than take
on a living monster. A hate-filled interpretation directed against an unorganized
group has greater political appeal.

Americans
fought a Civil War over slavery. The anti-slavery North won the war
but put a Reconstruction program into
effect that humiliated and antagonized
white southerners who then made a deal with northern Republicans to support
Rutherford B. Hayes for president in return for withdrawal of federal
troops and reestablishment of white rule in the southern states.
The races would
live side by side but in separate sets of institutions.

Southern
segregation put blacks into an inferior position: separate but not
equal. The
Democratic principle of political equality required that
the situation
be changed. However, justice did not come without a struggle. The struggle,
led by Dr. Martin Luther King, featured a cast of villains - southern
politicians, brutal police officers, small-town thugs, and jeering
mobs, all white
people. And that is the legacy passed along to us now from the Civil
Rights movement.

whites
adopt the Civil Rights paradigm

An
important element of the story was that black people were in the
minority. Vastly outnumbered, they were relatively powerless when
confronting a social establishment dominated by whites. But the Civil
Rights movement brought victory. It was an improbable, amazing victory
that inspired others to try the same thing.

Soon
other groups of people thought that this pattern of political activity
might work for them:
Women, even if they outnumbered men in the population,
might also be considered a minority if they were underrepresented in society’s
power structure. Staying home to raise children lacked prestige. Then came
the gays and lesbians, more distinctly a minority, who were despised and
persecuted even more than blacks. More recently, ethnic immigrants, including
persons who entered the country without permission, have become a militant
minority. All these groups, combined in a “rainbow coalition”,
confront a retrograde power elite on the wrong side of history,
consisting largely of white males.

Being
a white male myself, I have only the larger society with which to
identify. Not part of any organized power group,
I must see American society
as my society
and hope its leaders will do well. I belong to no demographic subgroup
that would allow me to stand back from this society and criticize it
or bring
forth grievances through identity politics. The political reality is
that the culture of aggrieved minorities has become the majority
culture, or
at least the dominant one, so that, in this context, the fingers of accusation
are pointing straight at me. My natural allies (other white males) have
deserted me. I have nowhere to hide. Society’s leaders - persons
who may look like me - have gone over to the other side.

To
the extent that a “backlash” has
developed among white people, it either takes the form of extreme defiance
- neo-Nazis and the like - or
of people who ineffectually complain about preferential policies like
affirmative action or minority set-asides. I see, or am encouraged
to see, black people
and others as my competitors receiving an unfair advantage. Yes, that
is true but it is not the worst thing that has happened. I sense in
our culture
an unspoken opinion that despises people like me and passes us off
as inconsequential and weak. We are made homeless in our own land.
We are
destined to be reduced
to nothingness and are scorned if we complain.

Ironically,
it is not black people expressing that attitude so much as other
whites. We
have white women despising white men, and white
men
avoiding white
women. We have an attitude that whatever we, the majority population,
might have accomplished is because of undeserved “privilege”.
Because of our present or past discriminatory practices, it is said
that other kinds
of people must work twice as hard as we to achieve the same results.
Therefore, we receive no sympathy. We have no effective community.
We Americans have
leaders who treat their positions of public trust with reptilian
disregard, the bonds of affectionate kinship (within the white community
at least)
having dissolved long ago.

In
earlier times, it was different. America was not cursed with self-hatred.
The turning point may have been
in the 1960s when the Civil Rights
movement came of age. This was a time when young Americans from
affluent homes
rebelled against college and against their own society. They took
psychedelic drugs
or engaged in sexually promiscuous acts, and a large number of
America’s
brightest young men and women protested against an Asian war that
their country was waging.

We
sometimes call this social movement the “counter-culture”,
meaning that it was a movement of protest against America’s “mainstream” culture.
The protesters, with little apparent cause, were dissatisfied
with their own society. They had developed an identity of alienation
from American culture.
The paradox of affluence and privilege combined with revolutionary
intent to overthrow the society that had created it was an element
in this identity.

In
the run-up to the Civil Rights victory, the 1960 election had put
a Harvard man in the White House. Overcoming religious prejudice,
American
voters
had
elected
the first
Roman
Catholic. President Kennedy was urging “the
brightest and best” of
that generation of educated persons to serve their country.
This new class of people on college campuses felt morally elevated.
On their way to success, they were driven by a sense of duty to serve
others. Their intelligent, supple young minds were open.
They were not like the narrow-minded persons living
in small towns who stuck with their own type of people; they
were tolerant and broadminded.

Then
came reports that black people were being mistreated in the south.
Southern bigots were trying to
maintain by force
a segregationist order that put white people above blacks.
Who
were these “bigots”? They were rural hillbillies
who never went to college. They were small-town sheriffs,
rednecks, and assorted “white trash”. Television
reports showed the uncouth white people shouting profanities
at blacks,
threatening
violence, or exhibiting other personal indignities. These
were low-class people from a parochial rural society who
were the
opposite of the affluent, well-educated northern youth. The
time was right for a crusade.

I
would therefore suggest that part of our attitude about race is
the product of
an ethic that centers on belonging to a higher class.
The young white crusaders came south to help black
people in distress. That’s what upper-middle
class people do - help the less fortunate. They looked
on those uneducated whites in the southern backwater
as a type of person they wished not to be.
The drive toward upward mobility in America had
left that type of person behind.
Race prejudice was a lower-class attitude,
not theirs.

Tom
Hayden's oppositional stance

The
Port Huron Declaration, founding document of the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), begins with these words: “We are people of this
generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities,
looking uncomfortably to the world we inherited.” In later
passages, it referred to racial injustice, the Cold War and the threat
of nuclear annihilation, “meaningless work” combined
with “idleness”, and other ills produced by the same
society that offered them a privileged place.

I
must admit that I harbored a vague dislike of the author of that
document, Tom Hayden,
who, after his student career, went on to work for racial integration
in the south, organize a protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention
in Chicago, and marry Jane Fonda. At the root of my dislike was a perception
that Hayden had contempt for Americans and for white people, in particular.
The revolutionary posture then was to be against something - something
of which I was a part. It was the posture of an elite group of intellectuals
opposed to America’s philistine culture. I sensed that Tom Hayden
and his colleagues were fundamentally insincere in dealing with people
like us.
Maybe that was not his attitude, but it seemed that way to me.

In
the summer of 2008, I watched an interview with Tom Hayden on C-Span
which opened
my eyes to another side of this man. Hayden was not a ranting
ideologue,
who spouted incendiary phrases, but a man who analyzed situations in
a lucid and articulate way. I was also struck by how similar Hayden’s
thoughts were to my own. In the early 1990s, I was involved in the fight
against NAFTA
and free trade. Hayden, a relative latecomer to that cause, went to Seattle
to participate in the protests against the World Trade Organization.
Hayden also criticized high-priced education, a view that I share.

Of
greatest interest to me, however, was what Tom Hayden had to say
about
personal identity. Being a political revolutionary from a comfortable
household had troubling implications for him. In the late 1960s, said
Hayden, if
I paraphrase him correctly, “I had my American identity beaten
out of me. I was a young white man from the midwest. Being a white
man was not promising.
My true identity was ‘stolen away’ from me by my upbringing
and parental expectations.”

Later
on, Hayden solved this personal dilemma by taking an interest in
Irish politics and the struggle against
British rule in northern
Ireland.
Being
an Irish-American helped “reconstruct who I am”, he said.
This formulation helped Hayden remain true to his principle of siding
with an
oppressed minority struggling against the establishment. Unlike the
situation with the Civil Rights movement of the ‘60s, he could
also himself be a part of an oppressed minority in regard to his
ethnicity.

I
started then to see Hayden as a kind of twin brother who had gone
off in a different political direction. We are roughly
the same age
and we
both
grew up in Detroit suburbs. Our fathers worked in managerial or
administrative positions with automobile companies. I, however, went
to Yale while
Hayden attended the University of Michigan. Politically, Hayden
turned to the
left while I, less prominently, turned to the right. I never
went over the
hump to oppose my own society.

The
reason, in my case, was that, as a midwesterner from a privileged
if provincial background, I was
alienated by the political liberalism
that
pervaded the Yale campus at the time. It was the same East Coast
arrogance that William
F. Buckley and, later, George W. Bush, rebelled against. Support
of the Civil Rights movement was a part of this culture. As a
result, I never
became involved
in that cause. While I was interested in politics, political
liberalism seemed unattractive. It was arrogant and dogmatic, having
little
respect
for people
like me.

Tom
Hayden, the far-left revolutionary, was not tilting at windmills
but, in fact, succeeded in bringing mainstream America
over to
his point of
view, at least as far as race relations are concerned. He organized
voter-registration drives in the south in the early 1960s and
was a sympathetic eyewitness
to
black protests in Newark later in the same decade. For more
than a decade, he was a state senator in California. It is a political
success
story
which few can match.

The
cornerstone of Hayden’s political
career was the Civil Rights movement. This enterprise succeeded
beyond anyone’s wildest expectation. The
reason is that the efforts of Martin Luther King, Tom Hayden,
and others involved in this movement found favor with the
political establishment during
the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson,
and, to a surprising extent, with big business, big labor,
educators, journalists, and religious
clergy of various creeds. Big-business support was significant.
According to one theory, its support of Civil Rights was
a move to co-opt the issue
of race and divert communist influence. Economic issues were
side tracked.

the
aftermath

Today,
opposition to white racism has become a civic religion enshrined
in law as well as in people’s hearts and minds. The problem
I have with this is not the advancement of black Americans to a position
of “equality” but the concurrent degradation of white
people. The anti-racist “religion” is built on a foundation
of white privilege and white guilt. The purpose of “black history” is
to remind whites of their historical guilt and their innately hateful
behavior threatening to re-erupt at any time.

As
a part of this culture, we remember uncouth white “bigots” shouting
at black children who were integrating southern public schools, and the
water hoses and police dogs turned against peaceful black protestors,
but forget
the fact that a moral appeal was made to the white population to suspend
the prejudice that they might have against all black people for the misdeeds
of a few . Whites generally accepted that proposition. Whites, not blacks,
turned the corner on race prejudice. Their reward for being tolerant has
been an enduring legacy of guilt.

Let
us be clear about this: Whites had a reason to be prejudiced against
blacks. They may personally have witnessed bad black behavior - what
one might
call “ghetto” behavior. They may, for instance, have heard
young blacks loudly arguing on the street late at night, or been personally
panhandled
or physically threatened or sexually solicited by blacks, or have heard
boom-boxes blaring rap-like music throughout the neighborhood, or watched
blacks throw
trash on the sidewalks, or let their pants sag down to their knees, or
walk carelessly through traffic whenever they please. They may be aware
that blacks
have a relatively higher crime rate, do not do as well as other groups
in school, and that illegitimacy followed by welfare support is higher
among
blacks
than most other groups of people.

My
purpose here is not to build a case against black Americans - for
bad behavior is found in all groups - but
to make the obvious but forbidden
point that whites are not being hateful or irrational when they exhibit “prejudice” against
black people. They are often reacting against something legitimately
to be disliked.

Having
said that, however, I must also agree that the appeal made to whites
not to judge all black people for the misdeeds
of some was valid.
Behaviors
can change. President Obama is an example
of someone who breaks the negative stereotype of black people. It
is certainly
not
fair to the person who is conscientious, considerate, and otherwise
a good citizen
of the community to place him under a blanket condemnation for what
others of his race have done. A civilized society must try to maintain
uniform
standards of conduct, judging the behavior of individuals rather
than groups.

My
argument is, therefore, not focused on the behavior of black people
but on the “conspiracy against the truth” when
it comes to white people’s perception of blacks. As I said,
the white dislike of blacks may well be rooted in fact. It is in
the nature of human thought to generalize
from particular cases. Therefore, when whites see blacks often
exhibiting a certain type of behavior, they will naturally form
a general conclusion
about black behavior. They will think this behavior is typical
of blacks and tend to judge all blacks accordingly. It is a habit
of
mind that needs
to be kept in check, but it is not malicious or untruthful. The
conclusions of honest thinking deserve to be respected.

Most
Americans today realize, however, that if one makes the type
of argument that I made above - which tends to blame blacks as
a group
for certain
undesirable behavior - one will be severely criticized, if not
worse, for saying such
things. (Maybe black people will riot!) To express this kind
of opinion marks one as a “racist”; and our culture teaches
us that racists are ignorant, violent types who want to lynch
black people. White racism cannot
be tolerated in this society, say the self-styled “decent” people.

But
I say: It is never dishonorable to think or speak the truth. The
facts speak for themselves. If you disagree with me because
you think
my facts
are wrong, then I will, of course, listen to your fact-based
arguments and be open to changing my point of view. But if
you try to silence
me or call
me a racist and a liar because I am going against the dominant
or a politically enforced view, I will oppose you. If you try
to threaten
or coerce me
for thinking certain things, I will resist. Yours is a conspiracy
against
the
truth; and I will be your enemy to the end of time.

I
believe that white people have been brought to the point of accepting
racial
guilt, not by the presentation of compelling
facts but by
intimidation. They must always be walking on egg shells,
for fear of black anger. People know in their hearts what is true
but
they are afraid to
say it, so powerful is the stigma of racism. We know that this
stigma
has
real
consequences.
People lose their jobs for real or perceived racial slurs.
They can be prosecuted for “hate speech”. Even
so, there is a core of innermost thought that cannot be successfully
invaded or disturbed unless the person himself
permits this. And too many whites have permitted it out of
fear. They have let themselves be forced to think in a certain
way. That, too, is a source
of deep shame.

One
often hears of white guilt suggesting that whites feel guilty because
of how they treated blacks over the years.
Whites ought
to feel guilty
about how they have treated themselves. They have surrendered
their integrity of
thought to persons making insistent, hateful arguments.
If America was once “the
land of the free and home of the brave”, white Americans
are no longer free or brave. They are enslaved to certain
political opinions and not brave
enough to admit this, even to themselves. They are, as
Eric Holder said, “racial
cowards”. If one white person stands up for his race,
a thousand other whites, even agreeing with him in private,
will remain silent.

I
know this. For a time, I was that one person willing to speak out
on the subject of race. (Read about my experiences at a certain race
workshop.) I learned first hand
what
was out
there in
the realm
of
political opinions when I ran in Minnesota’s Independence
Party primary for U.S. Senate in 2002. My strategy was
to differentiate myself from candidates
of the two major parties. The Republicans, I thought,
were mainly the party of big business. To irritate them,
I announced
that I favored legislation
to reduce the workweek to 32 hours. The Democrats, on
the other hand, were the party of the “rainbow
coalition”.
To give them a jolt, my campaign platform included a
plank to the effect that I supported “dignity
for white males”, adding “and (dignity) for
everyone else, too.”

My
shorter-workweek plank raised no particular concern. It was a harmless
proposal
that went nowhere. The opposition
to my “white-male dignity” plank,
however, was fierce. It came from an unexpected quarter:
the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune, the state’s largest
newspaper. Not only did this newspaper refuse to give
my campaign any press coverage (while running a front-page
article about my principal opponent) but it also refused
to accept any paid
ads from my campaign so long as they included the words “dignity
for white males”. I was told that the paper’s “legal
department” had
advised against it. Although my name was not once mentioned
in this newspaper during the campaign, I still managed
to receive 31 percent of the statewide
vote in a three-person race.

Something
was not right. Evidently to say that I was in favor of dignity for
white men marked me as a white
racist
and,
therefore, a certified
example of evil. This showed me how twisted our
political values
have become. Dignity,
I thought, was something that every human being should
have. I was delighted when a black-female member
of
Congress told
me that
she,
too, supported
the concept of “dignity for white males”.
It was instead a newspaper staffed mainly by white
editors and reporters that considered my views beyond
the pale. (There’s a story in here somewhere.)

In
summary, white Americans cannot feel good about
themselves in having submitted to what they know
to be wrong.
This acquiescence to untruth
creates a
spiritual sickness that leads to political impotence
and allows our government to continue in its corrupt
ways. It is disgusting
that a
group of people, white Americans, comprising sixty
percent of the
electorate, would allow themselves to be buffaloed
this way. As a white, I’m tempted
to despise my own people. Nathan Hale said he had
but one life to give to his country. Cannot some
white person today find the courage within himself
to say that he disagrees with this idea of “racism” and
how it has been used? I doubt if he will be hanged.

Free
speech and free thought are the road back to
health. To speak the truth in public engenders
pride
in oneself.
A courageous
and
self-respecting people
can, in turn, seize political control and reform
the government. As it
is, the present discussion of race has led to
a particularly nasty type of politics
where people are demonized for what they say.
Even certain kinds of jokes are forbidden these days.
We need to take
America back
from the
demonizers
in elite institutions and restore free speech.
Then freedom itself will prevail.